Microsoft Confirms Office 2011 and 2008 Compatibility with OS X Mountain Lion

[MacRumors]

Microsoft today confirmed that the two most recent versions of its flagship Office productivity suite for Mac are fully compatible with OS X Mountain Lion. Office users are advised to ensure that Microsoft AutoUpdate is enabled so that their installations can be updated as needed to take full advantage of the new operating system.

- Make sure you have Office for Mac's AutoUpdate enabled - some updates will be needed to make the most of the upgrade to Mountain Lion. Initiate AutoUpdate in any Office for Mac application by going to your toolbar, then selecting "Help" and then "Check for Updates."

- Mountain Lion ships with a new feature called Gatekeeper. Gatekeeper helps protect users by allowing you to choose to only download and install software from known developers, like Microsoft. Please note that due to the Gatekeeper architecture, updates will not run when you download and initiate them on your desktop; instead please use Microsoft AutoUpdate to keep your copies of Office for Mac current.

Article Link: Microsoft Confirms Office 2011 and 2008 Compatibility with OS X Mountain Lion

[SAdProZ]

Sigh. Now I'm gonna have to buy 2011.

[macpeach55]

Originally Posted by SAdProZ

Sigh. Now I'm gonna have to buy 2011.

Do it. Much better than 2008

[kbade]

yes, 2011 is MUCH better than 2008.

[sza]

I found copy and paste is very sluggish and slow, does anyone have the same experience?

[GoldenPRGuy]

Dude, it says 2008 is compatible. You should upgrade regardless, but that's still awesome backwards compatibility! Unlike Intuit!

http://macenstein.com/default/2012/0...ates-pricetag/

[claygreenberg]

Originally Posted by kbade

yes, 2011 is MUCH better than 2008.

In what way/s is 2011 much better than 2008? Why should I upgrade from 2008? Thanks!

[JNSC]

The ad on my page was for Food Lion, which got me thinking.....definitely the name for 10.9

[Stridder44]

Originally Posted by SAdProZ

Sigh. Now I'm gonna have to buy 2011.

2011 is without a doubt better. But really a 2011 replacment should be coming soon the next year or so

[nutmac]

On the other hand, much of Office 2011 (excluding Outlook 2011) is written in Carbon 32-bit, which means no retina display support.

[macpeach55]

Originally Posted by claygreenberg

In what way/s is 2011 much better than 2008? Why should I upgrade from 2008? Thanks!

With 2008 I had slow loadings of excel sheets, hangs, lots of crashes due to Fonts. Moved to 2011 and that all stopped. I am sure a bunch of people will chime in now with reasons why, but my experience was totally positive.

[a1exey1azar]

NOTE: MS Office 2011 Mac is NOT compatible with Retina Display of MacBook Pro 2012 Retina!!!

[tlevier]

10.9 Cougar?

[oneMadRssn]

Originally Posted by claygreenberg

In what way/s is 2011 much better than 2008? Why should I upgrade from 2008? Thanks!

In my experience it launches faster and uses less memory. The 3D layers visualization in PP is awesome. In Word, full screen (distraction-free) mode is great too.

However, I also find copy + paste seems to be very slow and crashes the app sometimes.

Overall, both 2008 and 2011 are pretty crappy, but better than iwork.

[macpeach55]

Originally Posted by a1exey1azar

NOTE: MS Office 2011 Mac is NOT compatible with Retina Display of MacBook Pro 2012 Retina!!!

But it works but just not as sharp as other apps on the display is what you mean?

[Muffin87]

How about Office 2011 going Retina-display-compliant?

Does anybody know anything about this?

I mean something official, deductions are very good but Office 2011 performance sucks so much I wouldn't be that surprised if they just rewrote the code to be 64-bit or if they went Office 2012 relatively soon.
In the end, 13-inch Retina MBPs are going to be released in the foreseeable future and I guess that Microsoft is bound to go Retina pretty soon if it doesn't want to lose those Office-aficionados that still go Office because of the relatively superior features (like the embedded bibliography tool in word).
Don't get me wrong, wasn't it for some of the features iWork simply miss, I'd abandon Office in a second, it's so slow and it crashes so often.

[a1exey1azar]

Originally Posted by macpeach55

But it works but just not as sharp as other apps on the display is what you mean?

Correct

[macpeach55]

Originally Posted by oneMadRssn

In my experience it launches faster and uses less memory. The 3D layers visualization in PP is awesome. In Word, full screen (distraction-free) mode is great too.

However, I also find copy + paste seems to be very slow and crashes the app sometimes.

Overall, both 2008 and 2011 are pretty crappy, but better than iwork.

Don't have crashes, but copy/paste sometimes is slow on my 2011 iMac. Just put an SSD into my MBP late 2008 and all that stopped, so it seems a read/write problem off of the "disk". Let us see what ML changes! (Will update the iMac on Sunday, after the first flurry)

[macpeach55]

Originally Posted by Muffin87

How about Office 2011 going Retina-display-compliant?

Does anybody know anything about this?

I mean something official, deductions are very good but Office 2011 performance sucks so much I wouldn't be that surprised if they just rewrote the code to be 64-bit or if they went Office 2012 relatively soon.
In the end, 13-inch Retina MBPs are going to be released in the foreseeable future and I guess that Microsoft is bound to go Retina pretty soon if it doesn't want to lose those Office-aficionados that still go Office because of the relatively superior features (like the embedded bibliography tool in word).
Don't get me wrong, wasn't it for some of the features iWork simply miss, I'd abandon Office in a second, it's so slow and it crashes so often.

You say Office 2011 performance sucks so much - I am not denying you are correct but can you be more specific? On what machine & in what way?

[Muffin87]

Originally Posted by macpeach55

You say Office 2011 performance sucks so much - I am not denying you are correct but can you be more specific? On what machine & in what way?

I basically used Word 2011 on a daily basis for over 9 months on a MacBook Pro Peryn 2.4 Ghz 4 GB RAM and on an iMac Merom 2.16 Ghz 2 GB RAM.
I wrote my graduation thesis on that - a single document about 150 pages long.
I just needed "more advanced features" that Pages lacked, as "advanced" as putting a footnote inside a table, having an horizontal page in a normally vertical-oriented document (when I say "advanced" I'm being ironic, I was outraged when I discovered Pages wouldn't let me put footnotes within tables).

Every time I loaded the document I had to scroll down to the last page and Word had to load every single page before I could start writing on the last one; it took at least 2 minutes every time.

Also every now and then I had very complex tables in my document: every time I touched a complex table too much, changing edges and margins rapidly, Word would crash.
It often crashed without an apparent reason, and it would often crash whenever I tried to put the cursor at specific points within the text.

Of course, I had all the service packs which came out installed right away.

... I'd also like to comment on the loading screen with the logo... seriously, sometimes I had the impression I was loading something as heavy as photoshop or a 3d modeling environment.

[Chupa Chupa]

Originally Posted by macpeach55

But it works but just not as sharp as other apps on the display is what you mean?

Heh. Not only not as sharp as other apps on the display, it's not as sharp as the graphics on my old 1980's vintage Intellivision. OK, to be fair Microsoft isn't the only big s/w player slow to the retina update. Annoying just the same. I also give a little blame to Apple for not picking up the slack by updating iWorks for retina.

[Lancer]

I was looking at 2011 but might stick with 2008 unless I can get a deal and the thrown in the latest Office when I get my new iMac.

[porky]

When i write a letter in Word for Mac i always have to zoom in or change the font size. Text in Word for pc looks a lot better/charper. Same with excel.

[Nickerbocker]

Originally Posted by claygreenberg

In what way/s is 2011 much better than 2008? Why should I upgrade from 2008? Thanks!

The whole UI is better and its much snappier than 2008. Also Outlook 2011 is really nice. I use it for my works Exchange which I like because it keeps my work stuff separate from my home stuff.

[BornAgainMac]

Originally Posted by macpeach55

Do it. Much better than 2008

They might have 2004, X, 2001, or 98 or a Windows version. They didn't say 2008.